A Colorado factory is making homes that are indistinguishable from traditionally built ones — and chipping away at the housing crisis

Yeah when they claimed 20% cheaper, I wasn't expecting much, given how expensive housing is these days. (And that's a 20% reduction in cost. They'd be fools to not sell at near-market rate when it's not as part of an affordable housing program.)

I thought it was interesting to see a company that has a solid reason for building houses in a factory. (That is, the short building season in the mountains.) For the most part, manufactured homes don't seem to be taking the world by storm, but hope springs eternal.

If you want to more about this,the Construction Physics blog has explored it from lots of different angles. For example, advanced framing can save a lot of material, so why isn’t it used more?

Building Complexity and the Construction Community of Practice

For a conventional wood framed house, a set of construction documents can be surprisingly sparse without impacting the builder’s ability to build it successfully. The drawings don’t need to show where each individual stud goes, or how construction needs to be sequenced, or even the sorts of headers that need to go over doors and windows. The designer can rely on the International Residential Code (which gives prescriptive header sizes) to provide much of the necessary information, and the skills and experience of the framing crew to fill in most of the gaps. This allows a building to be successfully designed and built with a comparatively small design budget.

The flip side of this is that you’ll face a lot of difficulty if you deviate from standard practice. An example of this is Advanced framing, or Optimum Value Engineering (OVE). Advanced framing allows a house to be built with less material and higher energy efficiency by removing “extra” wood members that aren’t needed to support the house (studs at 24 inches instead of 16 inches, 2 stud corners instead of 3, single top plates instead of double, etc.)

It seems like a trivial optimization, but it is shockingly difficult to get builders to adopt advanced framing. The details and assembly methods are different from conventional wood construction, it differs from what the building code prescribes (though the code allows it), and it’s not what framers have generally been trained to do - it exists outside the community of practice. Most advice for how to get a house built with advanced framing is “find a builder familiar with green building techniques” i.e.: find a builder in a different community of practice.

…

Even if I expect it to be better and cheaper than conventional methods, I can expect it to incur extra design costs (since I can’t rely on the builder or the code to fill in the gaps), and extra training costs. I’ll also probably need to accept an initial lower level of productivity and an increased number of mistakes, as the workers learn how to use the new system.

What’s more, these costs won’t be one-time - I’ll be paying them over and over again every time I get a new project crew or use a new contractor.

This puts conventional construction in a sort of local optimum - most new methods of building, even potentially cost-saving ones, will likely face an extended period of being more expensive and more difficult than conventional methods.